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It's Fun to Play the Piano ... Please Pass It On!

Well, imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered that an old recording I made of my son playing the first movement of Mozart's K333 is pulled off of youtube. EMI apparently thinks it's actually Daniel Barenboim. What idiots.

Actually, the video is still available in South Sudan and North Korea, but nowhere else.

I filed the usual dispute. If I have to, I'll bombard EMI with email directly. I'm getting good at this.

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"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

I am, but not for this reason! The matching filters they use are pretty crude. It's amusing to know that the filter couldn't distinguish the difference between a fourteen year old with 5.5 years of training and Daniel Barenboim. Usually the companies back off once I can get an actual person to look at the video in question.

Oh, geez, I just looked at the rest of our videos. The geniuses at EMI have claimed that my son's version of the Pathetique Rondo is actually Samson Francois.

Let me say this to them clearly and succinctly ...

Dear EMI,

Are you a bunch of boneheaded idiots? A twelve year old's playing of the Pathetique is NOT Samson Francois. Why don't you expend the fifteen seconds it would take to preview the video? I mean that; fifteen seconds is all it would take to reveal that a twelve year old with all of four years on the bench was providing this music. Perhaps no one in EMI can tell the difference. Yeah, that's the ticket. Guys, hire someone who has actually heard some classical music. Don't go around banning a twelve year old's videos in Germany.

Maybe somebody in the blogosphere will pick this up and run with it. I would dearly love to have you folks at EMI made to look like the ignorant bullies that you are!

Does EMI have any postings on youtube? Perhaps you should claim that these are really your son playing!

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

If you falsely file a claim of ownership of, or rights in, real estate, you can be liable to the true owner in many jurisdictions for "slander of title." I wonder if there's any way to apply that concept in internetland? OTOH, I'm not sure how you'd go about establishing damages. It might be fun, though...

Since I'm effectively reprinting it here, I guess it's also an OPEN LETTER to EMI ...

Quote:

EMI Music Publishing 550 Madison Avenue, 5th Floor New York, NY 10022

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is a small matter, hardly worth your time, I’m sure. But it’s enough of an annoyance to me that I have taken my time to draw your attention to it. The “it” is the false claim of ownership that EMI has made on two videos I made of my young son playing on my piano, in my music room, in my home, using my own crude recording equipment. I posted these videos on YouTube for him a number of years ago.

This is the first movement of the piano sonata in B-flat, K333, by Wolfgang Mozart. Since the piece of music is over 225 years old, it is clearly in the public domain. Your company seems to think it is a recording of Daniel Barenboim’s playing. Really? Anyone who actually viewed perhaps the first ten seconds of the recording would know that this is a fourteen year old, not Daniel Barenboim. The comparison is flattering to my son, I know, but that is fantasy, not reality.

This is the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. Again, this is clearly a work that is in the public domain. EMI seems to think that this is actually Samson François at the piano. My son was twelve for this one. I think he was pretty good for a twelve year old with only four years of training. But Samson Francois he was not. Again, even an unpracticed ear can hear his mistakes and his “youthful” interpretation.

But in making its claim of copyright violation, EMI did not use an ear, unpracticed or otherwise. Like all of your competitors, EMI continues to rely on extraordinarily crude filters to determine possible copyright violations on the Internet. In so doing, you entrap thousands of totally innocent people who are presumed guilty until they undertake possibly lengthy procedures to clear themselves. If you had to pay a hefty nuisance fee to each and every individual who proves that your claim was fraudulent, I suspect you would find better filters.

Since no such nuisance fee is in the offing, the best I can do is to politely send letters of this sort, asking you to spend five minutes actually to view the videos.

Well, imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered that an old recording I made of my son playing the first movement of Mozart's K333 is pulled off of youtube.

Other than EMI's obvious lack of attention to detail, why does this really matter?

Ed

Because EMI is requesting for piano-dad to take offline the video of his son. And it's infuriating at the least! (I call it fascist and I'm a composer and depended on copyrights actually, but still)...

Well, imagine my surprise this morning when I discovered that an old recording I made of my son playing the first movement of Mozart's K333 is pulled off of youtube.

Other than EMI's obvious lack of attention to detail, why does this really matter?

Ed

Ed, it's truly frustrating to expend hours on videoing, editing and up loading student performances, only to receive some banal tome from youtube telling you that your public domain material is copyrighted by some firm. It's not just EMI, there are others who troll youtube looking for possible ways to snag a royalty. I, for one, am going to assist EMI find the land of obscurity.

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

Ed, it's truly frustrating to expend hours on videoing, editing and up loading student performances, only to receive some banal tome from youtube telling you that your public domain material is copyrighted by some firm. It's not just EMI, there are others who troll youtube looking for possible ways to snag a royalty.

Originally Posted By: Mavis Johnson in THE JERK

Oooohhh --- so this is a PROFIT deal!

So, do I understand it correctly, John? Someone (EMI in this particular case) is attempting to collect royalties on PianoDad's son's performance?

(Now, sincerely trying to understand . . .)Ed

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In music, everything one does correctly helps everything else.

They would if they could. Mostly, I suspect, in EMI's case, it's just to protect their intellectual property, but doing so in the most offensive way imaginable.

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

Concerning these copyright disputes, YouTube says that someone else's advertisements may appear in your videos if they have a claim to the rights for any portion of the material. That's if YouTube leaves your videos up at all. Initially, my son's Mozart video was blocked almost worldwide, though YouTube didn't actually remove it from my site, or remove my account entirely. They can do that. They can close your account down.

I think they tend to leave things for a while, in case the person who posts the video files an official dispute. I did that, and the videos again became viewable (I think). The ball then goes back into EMI's court, and they have a time window to "review" things. But in the end, all they have to do is reiterate their claim and you lose. YouTube blocks the video and/or nukes your account. There is no neutral arbiter and YouTube exercises no judgment. It would be far too costly to YouTube to be a referee. I get that. But the real power is in the hands of the rights ownership corporations like EMI. They really don't have to exercise any due process if it costs them anything. They can continue to use these crude bots to "match" content. The result is a claim that a kid's playing is that of Daniel Barenboim.

My only weapon is to contact the group privately, either by email -- if I can find it somewhere -- or by direct mail. I have done the latter in this case. EMI is notoriously hard to contact.

Thank you for the clarification; your explanation is more in line with what I assumed was happening. So, is the real complaint by EMI that their ARTISTS (Barenboim, etc) are appearing “publicly” without proper compensation? Or that EMI’s performance rights on the music are being violated? Or something else?

I suppose what I am looking for is whether EMI has any legitimate rights to limit the public performance of these pieces of music.

Ed

_________________________
In music, everything one does correctly helps everything else.

I'm certain that EMI does have the right to limit public posting of work by artists under contract to them. That's what intellectual property protection is all about. This is about rights and about money.

My objection here is to the process. The Internet has made copyright violation very easy. Music Rights groups like EMI think of automated matching programs as leveling the playing field, so to speak. These bots that crawl the web looking for pirated content are designed to sniff out little bits of content that are embedded in other peoples' work, as well as to find outright republishing, all of which dilutes the value that EMI provides to their clients.

But the matching programs seem quite crude at this point, so they sweep up the innocent with almost as much accuracy as the guilty. In statistics, there are type I and type II errors. This is the false positive and false negative problem in medical testing. My guess is that these matching programs have a large problem with false positives, i.e. they falsely identify content as pirated. But YouTube acts on the false positives unless the innocent victim actively badgers people to release the claim. Many won't bother, I'm sure. Me, I just get pissed. I'm happy to make a stink and take it public. Heck, I would love some blogger or Op-Ed writer to use my open letter in a very public way, like on the pages of the New York Times. Yeah, that would do! The pressure of embarrassment is about the only weapon I can bring to bear.

P*D and Ed, I'm not certain of this, but it was my understanding that the advertising revenue generated is used in part to pay the copyright holder royalties. Thus it is extremely important to deny pretenders any royalty income.

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

P*D, have you thought about copyrighting your son's performances and allowing youtube to advertise on it and then paying you royalties for each site visitor? What is involved in generating an actual copyright? Something more than just a letter to the Library of Congress?

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

We're well down that road. You do not need to copyright the material that you "monetize" on your YouTube account. Monetizing videos only requires that you swear and aver that the content is indeed your own. You create an Adsense account, and then you can allow YouTube to insert a text advertisement in the bottom of the video and/or allow them to place a short advertisement video before your video begins. Both of these ads can be closed out by a viewer if they hit an "x" button at the right time. Then the viewer proceeds to your video. Adsense has some algorithm for determining the value of each viewing of a monetized video based on how long the advertisement stays visible to the viewer. They also screen out self-dealing, i.e. you can't watch your own video over and over to boost advertising revenue.

For videos that go viral, the revenues can be quite large. For most people, however, it is mere pennies. And you have to get to $100 in revenue before YouTube pays out. P*S is closing in on that amount, actually, so I hope he can get a check for $100 in the next few months. He has two videos that are getting between 100 and 200 views per day. That's not too bad for classical. Both are Beethoven. Go figure. I think it's because they are graded pieces in the RSM scale, and thousands of kids in Hong Kong, Korea and Malaysia tune in to see how others play the graded works.

This is another reason why musical rights companies like EMI and Angel are getting aggressive about intellectual property rights. Somebody is getting money.

Interesting. And depressing that posters are dependent on youtube's integrity and scale.

_________________________
"Those who dare to teach must never cease to learn." -- Richard Henry DannFull-time Private Piano Teacher offering Piano Lessons in Olympia, WA. www.mypianoteacher.comCertified by the American College of Musicians; member NGPT, MTNA, WSMTA, OMTA

Yes, but I would bet that anything sent to that address will be read by some assistant whose job is to place as much distance as possible between the busy performer and the public. But heck, if anyone wants to point him to this thread, be my guest!

Don't know if this is an option for you but you can change the Title and Tags sometimes to be more vague.

For instance, when I post covers that list both the Title of the piece AND the Artist then I often find Youtube sends me a rude notice my video may infringe on someone's copyright.

So now I just use the Title (and don't put the Artist anywhere in the Post). Or sometimes you can use just the Artist (if they only have 1 o 2 popular pieces). Many times, just the Title (if it is unique enough) is enough for many people to find your video .